Vivian Maier @ HGG

MattKing said:

I doubt it is stealing
If the law is anything like here, the onus is heavily on the tenant to make sure that payment is made. Those storage locker terms, and the responsibilities of the tenant are pretty clear. If the tenant doesn't respond to a contractually provided notice of a change in rate or payment method, then the "landlord" is entitled to take possession of the contents, send and publish notice of intention to auction off those contents and, if payment is not provided within the statutory notice period (30 days apparently in the Chicago area), then the landlord is entitled to proceed with the sale.

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OK messy enough as it is. https://www.storagefront.com/therentersbent/what-happens-when-you-dont-pay-for-your-storage-unit/
So basically they set up a family trust to take a percentage of the royalties and the rest goes to the state which made a deal with Maloof for a percentage?

There's no such thing as a trust that can't be relatively easily broken...it just takes expertise, money, and time. Irrevocable trusts aren't immune.

I recruited dozens of trust specialists to do that for bank trust departments....they took real estate, businesses, and financial assets out of one trust and moved it to another.

"Legacy" means dollar value to lawyers, but to warm-blooded people who are arts-oriented, personal-values-oriented, it means something entirely different...memories, for example. The vermin are fouling the latter in pursuit of the former.

awty said:

So basically they set up a family trust to take a percentage of the royalties and the rest goes to the state which made a deal with Maloof for a percentage?

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The laws vary slightly with jurisdiction.
But if intestate heirs can be identified and determined with appropriate certainty, they get the estate, less expenses, including reasonable fees for the administration of it.
The problem arises when the identity of the intestate heirs cannot easily be determined, because there are no close relatives and the more distant relatives who would be entitled to a share cannot easily be found and identified. In that case, a trust (not a family trust) is created, court rulings are made about how long it will be maintained, and then during that time efforts continue to identify and locate those distant relatives in order to give them notice and the opportunity to make a claim.
The time that the trust needs to be maintained can end up being quite long, at least partially because the rules of intestate succession can result in potential claimants that are infants at the time of the intestate's (Vivian Maier's) death. Any such time needs to be long enough to permit those infants to become adults before time starts to run for them.
All Ms. Maier needed was a proper Will naming whoever she wished as a beneficiary - it could have been anyone - and all this would have been avoided.

jtk said:

There's no such thing as a trust that can't be relatively easily broken...it just takes expertise, money, and time. Irrevocable trusts aren't immune.

I recruited dozens of trust specialists to do that for bank trust departments....they took real estate, businesses, and financial assets out of one trust and moved it to another.

"Legacy" means dollar value to lawyers, but to warm-blooded people who are arts-oriented, personal-values-oriented, it means something entirely different...memories, for example. The vermin are fouling the latter in pursuit of the former.

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Her mother had some sort of a relationship with a professional photographer in the thirties, no doubt she would of learnt how to correctly use a camera at an early age and had an understanding of how to run a photography business, but apart from selling a few postcards while living in France there is no evidence that she ever tried to seek any financial gain from her pictures on the contrary she rarely showed them to anyone. Also had no intrest in fortune, she received an inheritance and went on a world tour to places less travelled and when she spent all the money she went back to a low paid job and spent all her disposable income on film. There is evidence she had strong social views. She may of had some kind of manifesto, but that has either been thrown out, the original buyer of one of the lockers threw out a lot of papers and documents (she kept everything as she was a hoarder) and subsequent lockers shared the same fate, or they are kept hidden.
Without proper context her pictures are just photos, galleries are still advertising based on a fairytale of Maloof discovering the locker and saving all her pictures and she dreamed of one day having her pictures randomly shown in public for all to love her.......We would all be "vermin" to her.

Witold said:

If Maloof kept the box to himself, he would have the right to keep and/or sell it at whatever price. He instead decided to make a long term profit game out of this, while spinning Maier's life to fit his rhetoric.
I hope the negatives will be yanked out of his hands and put into MOMA's or somebody where many would feel more comfortable for what they are.

To me, Maloof has gone so far publishing Maier already, he should not be allowed to pull back and rest on his laurels, unless he gives up what he bought by donating them all, retract all claims he's been making, and remain forgotten.

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Thanks for the info.
It seems she may have more relatives than i realized. I also was not aware of how far back in time probate went. In fact, i thought the opposite occurred. If a person does not leave a will of some sort, i thought the "State" absorbed everything.
I guess this is not over. The outcome seems to still be a way in the distance. I am sure it will be interesting.

Maloof had nothing to do with Vivian Maier's storage lockers.
Their contents were bought by a company named RPN sales who were in the business of buying things from storage locker sales and then turning them around at a profit.
RPN bought everything for $260.00, broke it all up into smaller lots and then sold those lots from their premises for a total of about $20,000.00. Maloof was actively involved at that time in eBay and similar sales of vernacular photography. He bought one large lot with an absentee bid, liked what he saw and started tracking down other purchasers, some of whom re-sold to him.
And as for probate of intestate (meaning no valid Will, or a Will that fails to deal with the entire estate) estates, while the laws vary with jurisdiction, most that sprung from the traditional English roots (which most of the US and Canada did) built a whole system to try to prevent estates from going to the King/the Government.
The challenge with an intestacy is that the applicable law sets out a set of rules specifying who gets what and how much. Those rules divide an estate amongst the relatives of the deceased based on how close those relatives are in the deceased's family tree - a so called tree of consanguinity.
I'll discuss intestacy a bit to try to give a sense of the complexity.
Using my jurisdiction as an example, simple families are easy to deal with - surviving spouses or spouses and kids share in everything, according to a formula.
If there are no surviving spouses or kids, then surviving parents share.
If there are no surviving spouses, kids or parents, then surviving siblings share, provided that if a sibling pre-deceased leaving "issue", then that "issue" shares their parent's share, divided per stirpes (the first use of Latin here, but it becomes very common when you start researching intestate succession).
"Issue" include children, grand-children, great grand-children, etc. - they all share in that per stirpes distribution.
If there are no surviving spouses, children, parents, siblings or issue of siblings, then attention turns to the siblings of the parents (uncles and aunts), but if they pre-deceased than the shares that would other wise have gone to those siblings are divided between their issue per stirpes. So now we are getting into the problem of identifying various distant cousins of various degrees. And because the division is amongst issue, you can have shares split up among people over several generations, including infants whose entitlements cannot be finalized until they attain an appropriate age of majority.
Vivian Maier had lots of distant relatives, but she had little or no contact with any of them in her later years. Many are/were in France, but they are/were in many other parts of the world. At the time of her death, none of those relatives were close enough to her in the tree of consanguinity to permit an easy and simple resolution of her estate. And it doesn't appear that there was anyone around who had all the necessary family information neatly organized in a form that would help resolve the problem.

Holy Cow.!
Thanks for the post Matt.
That was VERY Well laid out.

I think a big problem with "Law" is that it often clashes with "Justice"..... and what people judge to be right or wrong.

awty said:

Her mother had some sort of a relationship with a professional photographer in the thirties, no doubt she would of learnt how to correctly use a camera at an early age and had an understanding of how to run a photography business, but apart from selling a few postcards while living in France there is no evidence that she ever tried to seek any financial gain from her pictures on the contrary she rarely showed them to anyone. Also had no intrest in fortune, she received an inheritance and went on a world tour to places less travelled and when she spent all the money she went back to a low paid job and spent all her disposable income on film. There is evidence she had strong social views. She may of had some kind of manifesto, but that has either been thrown out, the original buyer of one of the lockers threw out a lot of papers and documents (she kept everything as she was a hoarder) and subsequent lockers shared the same fate, or they are kept hidden.
Without proper context her pictures are just photos, galleries are still advertising based on a fairytale of Maloof discovering the locker and saving all her pictures and she dreamed of one day having her pictures randomly shown in public for all to love her.......We would all be "vermin" to her.

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"proper context" means some sort of authoritarian premise, precisely the dream that fuels ambulance chasing. I think the "fairytale" is of more profound (i.e. artistic) value than anything the legal rabble will ever dream up.

CMoore said:

I think a big problem with "Law" is that it often clashes with "Justice"..... and what people judge to be right or wrong.

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I was just glad I had another chance to reference consanguinity .
I don't see any such clash - I just see a natural consequence of a very old premise about the relative values of things.
This is an interesting question for the Ethics and Philosophy sub-forum:
All that complex law on intestacy is based on a many century old legal and equitable premise - that it is more important that estates stay within families - no matter how extended and remote the members of those families may be - than that they be easily and efficiently dealt with when there is an intestacy.
That premise arose in a world where the "estate" was a castle and the surrounding lands (and the peasants working on them).
Does that premise make sense today?

Without lawyers and laws we would be fighting it out in the woods. In terms of greed, when my parents passed, our lawyer went through the entire process for 2% of the value of the estate. Real estate agents don't work that cheap!
Our lawyer has helped us resolve a complex issue with a trust. My wife was getting no where, the lawyer got involved and the issue was resolved. I think he charged 500 bucks an hour, but he can do in an hour what we couldn't do in a year.

No will chaos.

And yes Vivian's work is amazing.

MattKing said:

That premise arose in a world where the "estate" was a castle and the surrounding lands (and the peasants working on them).
Does that premise make sense today?

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I don't have any peasants, but there's a pesky gopher and several chipmunks around my house. The next tenant will need to make peace with them as they aren't leaving..

Presuming that the negatives were sold prior to death then they will not be part of "the estate". However I suppose that copyright would be and so a part of the commercial profit from the sale of prints would be what the family members would be entitled to. If nobody makes and sells prints then the copyright has no income. If the business of dealing with the family is too onerous, then no prints will be made. The ownership of the copyright has value only insofar as the owners of the negatives are allowed to monetize them. I would imagine that the value of the estate on the day Vivian died was as close to zero as possible and only through the labour of the owners of the negatives, has that changed. I expect that the estate should compensate them.
Everybody has to play nicely.

MattKing said:

I was just glad I had another chance to reference consanguinity .
I don't see any such clash - I just see a natural consequence of a very old premise about the relative values of things.
This is an interesting question for the Ethics and Philosophy sub-forum:
All that complex law on intestacy is based on a many century old legal and equitable premise - that it is more important that estates stay within families - no matter how extended and remote the members of those families may be - than that they be easily and efficiently dealt with when there is an intestacy.
That premise arose in a world where the "estate" was a castle and the surrounding lands (and the peasants working on them).
Does that premise make sense today?

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There are lots of anti justice laws. They are written by corporate attorneys, and then handed in whole to congressmen for implementation into our (usa) society. But that goes way past Vivian Maier.

I was not implying, or did not mean to imply, that Estate Law is "unjust" in this case. It seems reasonable to me. But i can see where some would disagree with it.
Most people probably view a Slide or Negative like a pair of shoes. If you buy it at a locker sale, it belongs to you. You can do whatever you want with it.
For some reason, people view Music and Movies differently. Most folks would never try to sell copies of songs or movies just because they bought one at a garage sale.

Although the production of a positive from a negative does involve some additional artistic input, decisions about paper surface, contrast and exposure i.e. a transformative work... maybe.

MattKing said:

I was just glad I had another chance to reference consanguinity .
I don't see any such clash - I just see a natural consequence of a very old premise about the relative values of things.
This is an interesting question for the Ethics and Philosophy sub-forum:
All that complex law on intestacy is based on a many century old legal and equitable premise - that it is more important that estates stay within families - no matter how extended and remote the members of those families may be - than that they be easily and efficiently dealt with when there is an intestacy.
That premise arose in a world where the "estate" was a castle and the surrounding lands (and the peasants working on them).
Does that premise make sense today?

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Ownership of art is not similar to art. Generalizing from real estate (castle etc) doesn't work around art any more than generalizing from dentistry does. I

CMoore said:

There are lots of anti justice laws. They are written by corporate attorneys, and then handed in whole to congressmen for implementation into our (usa) society. But that goes way past Vivian Maier.

I was not implying, or did not mean to imply, that Estate Law is "unjust" in this case. It seems reasonable to me. But i can see where some would disagree with it.
Most people probably view a Slide or Negative like a pair of shoes. If you buy it at a locker sale, it belongs to you. You can do whatever you want with it.
For some reason, people view Music and Movies differently. Most folks would never try to sell copies of songs or movies just because they bought one at a garage sale.

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There's a grocery store here in Iowa City that has a dozen DVD-R recorders making DVDs. These are not English language for the most part, I'm sure some blockbuster Hollywood movies go through there too. I honestly don't think that they really understand copyrights. I used to go to the library and Xerox books, I will deny this is me typing if ever brought to the attention of the authorities.

mshchem said:

There's a grocery store here in Iowa City that has a dozen DVD-R recorders making DVDs. These are not English language for the most part, I'm sure some blockbuster Hollywood movies go through there too. I honestly don't think that they really understand copyrights. I used to go to the library and Xerox books, I will deny this is me typing if ever brought to the attention of the authorities.

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A good friend of mine bought a local bar 10 years ago.
It is no secret that Rock Bands do not make money like they used to.
The ASCAP has been working overtime on trying to collect for its members.

I have no idea how they would enforce this stuff, but they came into my friends bar and told him he either needs to turn off his CD player, or cough up money to ASCAP, or subscribe to a Muzak type of service.
He told the two "inspectors" he would install a jukebox.
The two guys never came back (far as he knows) and he just kept using his CD player in his bar.
It seems stupid, but i suppose he IS violating law.

jtk said:

"proper context" means some sort of authoritarian premise, precisely the dream that fuels ambulance chasing. I think the "fairytale" is of more profound (i.e. artistic) value than anything the legal rabble will ever dream up.

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Disney will buy the rights for the movie and turn it into a musical......and that will be art.

awty said:

Disney will buy the rights for the movie and turn it into a musical......and that will be art.

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Vivian Maier did dress in some ways like Mary Poppins sometimes .....

MattKing said:

Vivian Maier did dress in some ways like Mary Poppins sometimes .....

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Ha, She was smart to work out if she dressed like some ones mother you would be less likely to object to getting your picture taken. Added bonus having a child or two with you.
Bought $1 dresses from charity stores for financial reasons as well.......we can only speculate, but I tend think of her as highly intelligent and motivated in whatever she was trying to achieve.

awty said:

Ha, She was smart to work out if she dressed like some ones mother you would be less likely to object to getting your picture taken. Added bonus having a child or two with you.
Bought $1 dresses from charity stores for financial reasons as well.......we can only speculate, but I tend think of her as highly intelligent and motivated in whatever she was trying to achieve.

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Professor Bannos was able to locate a number of camera store employees who had clear memories of dealing with her - sometimes over a long period of time. She was apparently quite particular about the quality of prints she paid for from the photo labs that serviced those stores. Apparently she requested and obtained redone and corrected prints on a regular basis.
She also made arrangements to have many postcards printed for her by the photographer and printer who operated a business in the small town in France where a good portion of her relatives originated from. It seems negatives were going back and forth across the Atlantic regularly, accompanied on their return by prints.
While Maloof bought negatives and films from the auctions that dispersed many of her goods, others bought prints and movies and papers and clothes and all sorts of other things. There were significant numbers of prints included in those lots, including 11x14 enlargements. Professor Bannos observes that John Maloof tended to publish photos that were different from the photos that Vivian Maier chose to print or have printed.

I have seen those prints you speak of Matt.. they are quite lovely.

Why is Banos called "professor"? That sounds like an antique label...in the US it means he has tenure somewhere, doesn't mean relevant expertise..

jtk said:

Why is Banos called "professor"? That sounds like an antique label...in the US it means he has tenure somewhere, doesn't mean relevant expertise..

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Because she is a professor at Northwestern University: https://art.northwestern.edu/people/pamela-bannos

I just started reading the book.
I have a feeling it is going to raise as many question as it answers.
It is well written, and the author seems to have a "passionate" interest in Vivian.

Roger Gunderson bought all five of Vivian's forfeited lockers for $260.00
He hauled out 2-1/2 truck loads of her stuff. He said his 16 foot truck can support 2 tons and he was worried that he was over-loading the truck suspension.

So it begins. The book has not (yet) mentioned what he eventfully charged for the contents.
I am sure it was a lot less than what people like Mr. Maloof have parlayed the Story/Film/Negatives into.

Looks like he sold it all for 20k. Not bad.